YVETTE Cooper's dream is that everyone should be able to buy their own home if they want to.

That they should not be excluded on grounds of price or geography and that any new homes should be as environmentally efficient as possible.

Just how the housing minister is going to make this a reality is not so clear.

She points to the launch of the HomeBuy scheme, an innovative way of helping a small section of the population onto the ladder, and explored in detail in this week's Homes Finance, but also said that local councils should be following the government's lead and releasing more land for development.

She told the MEN : "We would like to see more land coming forward and being released by local authorities for development with a continued focus on Brownfield sites and we that more councils should be using their assets to do more building.

"The plain fact is that we need to build more houses right across the country, including the north west, and that, unless we do, people will still be unable to climb on the property ladder and still the price of property will escalate. That is not good for communities individually or the country as a whole."

Innovative

She praised the work of the Pathfinder projects in Manchester and Salford for the innovative solutions to replacing old housing highlighting Urban Splash's up-side down terraces on the old Langworthy estate and the work in east Manchester.

But she agreed that people should have a choice about where they lived and that regional plans should dictate future development.

She said: "Obviously the government needs to oversee the total housing stock supply but there needs to be regional planning to respond to regional need and demand and we are looking at ways of speeding up the whole planning process so councils can move more quickly.

"Our main priority is to increase the number of social homes being built either for rent or available on a shared equity basis. We are allocating more funds, most of that investment will go to Housing Associations because they are then able to raise extra revenue to build even more hew houses.

"But we think that more councils should be using their assets to start building their own housing stock again."

And she revealed that following on from the experiment of the é60,000 house there was to be a similar competition, only this time to build a low-cost/low carbon home where energy comes from renewable sources and high insulation means low emissions.